Strategy is the bridge between an idea and it’s implementation, whereby, the effectiveness of the strategy maybe directly responsible for the quality of success. Easy-Strategy.com has published a nice article, some of which I’ll reference here for emphasis. The word “strategy” derives from the Greek word stratçgos; which derives from two words
- stratos – army
- ago – leading/guiding/moving
Merriam-Webster defines strategy as “The science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces of a nation or group of nations to afford the maximum support to adopted policies in peace or war”. Although, the idea behind strategy is to devise mechanisms (battle plans) by which a given set of objectives may be attained, let’s slightly generalize this definition and remove the military aspect, so we can analyze the concept without the distraction of implementation specifics. So, our modified definition then is:
The science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and available task forces to achieve said objective
If we are to assume the definition above sufficiently captures the concept of strategy, we can then break it down to its elements and produce a generic strategy development model. Here’s an elaboration of the keywords within the context of developing strategy:
- Science – mathematical models
- Art – experience and intuition
- Political – governing body
- Economic – product/service life cycle
- Psychological – perception and related behavior
- Task force – resources tasked with various aspects of identification, analysis, development & implementation
- Objective – desired outcome
Strategy could then be described as a road map which begins with objective, uses science and art to draw a mission pathway to psychologically influence the economics within the bounds of political conditions and uses appropriate task forces to carry out various aspects of such mission. A strategy has a starting point, an end point, and a set of moving components between them, it could thus be loosely compared to control systems. However, missing in this basic definition is a feedback loop, which is a key component in control systems and are used to measure success and adjust course as appropriate. Since a business strategy is ultimately tied to the bottom line, it must integrate a feedback loop to measure its effectiveness and adjust course as appropriate to achieve objective.
If we model the strategy development process after a generic solution development process, we can generate a high level task list:
- Identify – current state with readily available information
- Stated business objectives, relevant to the target strategy
- Business case
- Constants & variables
- Success criteria
- Analyze – current state and trends of stakeholders
- Organization
- Environment
- Employees
- Customers
- Competitors
- Governing bodies
- Develop
- Strategy elements
- Implementation & governance tasks
- Test developed elements
- Implement strategy elements
- Monitor
- Success based on predefined criteria
- Dynamic elements
We’ll next use this formula to develop an instance of a strategy, Raise Market Share